On Saturday, Netflix announced that Queen Elizabeth will take her customary year off, and return in “The Crown” in November 2022. The proclamation was part of Netflix’s Tudum jubilee, a global celebration of the streamer’s global commonwealth of film and TV titles.
After sweeping the Emmy awards in its fourth season, “The Crown” will return with an all-new cast playing the British royal family, including Imelda Staunton as Queen Elizabeth, Jonathan Pryce as Prince Philip, Lesley Manville as Princess Margaret, Dominic West as Prince Charles, Elizabeth Debicki as Princess Diana, and Olivia Williams as Camilla Parker Bowles. Jonny Lee Miller will also appear as Prime Minister John Major.
This will be the third and final cast cycle for “The Crown,” which launched in 2016 with Claire Foy playing Queen Elizabeth at the start of her reign for two seasons. Then the show took a year off following Season 2, and returned in 2019 with Olivia Colman leading the cast as the Queen for Seasons 3 and 4.
Staunton was initially only supposed to play Elizabeth for a single, final season, but creator and executive producer Peter Morgan ultimately expanded Staunton’s tenure through Season 6 of the show, which Morgan has said will be its last. Season 5 is expected to chronicle the disintegration of Charles and Diana’s marriage, which formally ended in 1996, but it is unclear if Season 5 will also depict the events leading up to Diana’s tragic death in a car wreck in 1997. Morgan already captured those events as the screenwriter of the 2006 feature “The Queen,” which won Helen Mirren an Oscar for her performance as Queen Elizabeth.